Steve Urbon column: New Bedford is the city that went from harpoons to toys

Friday

Feb 21, 2014 at 12:01 AMFeb 21, 2014 at 5:31 AM

An anonymous donor had given a huge collection of toys from the old Ted Toyler factory to the Whaling Museum, and it won't be long before it's on display in an exhibit about the city's commerce and industry history.

In all the time I've been at this newspaper (34 years), I never once had heard of the Ted Toyler toy factory.

That changed last weekend when Mike Dyer, the Whaling Museum's senior maritime curator told the "River and Rail" symposium that an anonymous donor had given a huge collection of the toys to the museum, and it won't be long before it's on display in an exhibit about the city's commerce and industry history.

The Ted Toyler factory opened in 1925, and at its rapidly reached peak employed hundreds and shipped 50,000 mostly wooden and tin pull-toys to the entire world, including the Far East and South America.

Located at the foot of School Street, for a while the company was as widely known as the Weeden Toy Co. of New Bedford, which sold to the world's young boys toy steam engines for seven decades ending in 1952.

Movie theaters exhibited Ted Toyler toys in the lobby during Saturday children's matinees in which the products were part of the show — early and successful product placement.

Today, the collection of brightly colored Ted Toyler products lies on metal shelves in the Whaling Museum's vault alongside a fearsome collection of the harpoons and whale guns left behind by the decline of whaling.

But to Dyer, the juxtaposition represents something important that the museum is beginning to seriously address: the evolution of the local economy and the refocus of the harbor toward railroads for imports of raw materials and fuel and the export of manufactured goods like toys.

The keynote speaker at the symposium, New Bedford-born Dr. Kingston Heath of the University of Oregon, set the tone for the next wave of historic preservation and research by cautioning the city of "historic amnesia."

"Many facets of the manufacturing heritage have been generally ignored," he said.

The economy didn't continue to evolve and survive on the basis of "picturesque but defunct whaleships."

What set Dyer on this new line of inquiry was a photograph, taken in the years after the decline of whaling, in which the harbor was teeming with ships, sloops, schooners and barges of every description.

They were vessels that represented the wide variety of industries that were popping up in the city, and the reliance on coal along with a good water system to run the boilers in the vast new textile mills.

But saving a city's manufacturing heritage poses problems. Unlike Lowell, where a concentrated mill complex allowed for preservation as a national park, New Bedford's mills were strung along the entire length of the city. Thanks to coal power they could be located anywhere, and they were.

Dyer faces another problem: obtaining the papers of these businesses to be used for research in the future.

Revere Copper and Brass, he said, simply refused to donate its records when the plant closed.

Morse Twist Drill's records were saved in large part by a scavenger who sold them to the museum.

Records of J.C. Rhodes, a metal eyelet manufacturer, disappeared without a trace as well. Even the location of surviving looms is largely a mystery.

The Merchant's Bank records, however, were discovered by the current owner of the building a few years back and quickly put into Dyer's hands.

The museum's intent is to close some of the gaps in the understanding of how commerce and manufacturing changed the face of New Bedford and the dynamics of the port.

Three exhibits are being prepared, starting in December, to follow this development, starting with "Following the Fish," then the years from 1602 to 1825, and finally the manufacturing heyday.

Before it's too late.

Steve Urbon's column appears in The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at 508-979-4448 or surbon@s-t.com.